"Harlan Ellison - FROM A TO Z IN SARSAPARILLA ALPHABET" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

FROM A TO Z, IN THE SARSAPARILLA ALPHABET

FROM A TO Z, IN THE SARSAPARILLA ALPHABET

P is for PHOENIX
The sightseeing bus to Paradise had left nearly an hour earlier, when the tourists from Billings, Montana came wandering back to the Fountain of Youth. Bernie sat on the lowermost branch of the Tree of Life, overlooking the Fountain, using an emery board on his talons and regularly preening his feathers. He watched their approach from the East, and thought to himself, Here we go again.
The husband and wife came trudging to the edge of the pool that surrounded the Fountain of Youth, and the woman sat down in the sand, and emptied her spectator pumps. Her husband, a corpulent man in his fifties, removed his straw hat, pulled a soiled handkerchief from his hip pocket, and swabbed at his sweating brow. He bent to take a drink from the Fountain.
"Probably not a terrific idea," Bernie said, spreading his wings and fluffing through the range of scarlet into gold.
The tourist looked up. "Beg your pardon?"
"What I said," said the Phoenix, "is that it's not in your best interests to take a drink from this pool."
"We've been walking across the desert for about three hours," the man said. "I assume the tour bus left without us." The Phoenix nodded, aimed a wingtip toward the West.
"Well, a fine howdoyoudo that is," the wife of the tourist said, herself a tourist. "Just take off and abandon us without so much as a by-your-leave."
"They waited almost an hour," Bernie said. "The bus driver said something about having to get back for the Apocalypse, or somesuch. To be fair, though, they really couldn't provide any sort of 'by.your-leave,' because you weren't here."
"Three hours," the man said. "Three hours in the desert, walkingback, just because one of the other people on the tour, I think an orthodontist from Beirut, said we could see the remains of the last four or five levels of the Tower of Babel if we walked over thataways."
"And you believed him?" Bernie asked, trying to restrain his amusement.
"Well..."
"And how much did he stick you for the map?" the Phoenix said.
"Map? What map?"
"Then what was it?"
"Er, uh, you mean the key?"
"Oh, that's sensational," Bernie said, unable to restrain himself any longer. "A key? He sold you a key? To what?"
"To the secret door in the base of the Tower of Ba--" He stopped. "You're trying to tell me we were hoodwinked?"
"Fleeced is more like it," the Phoenix said. "You know how many millennia it's been since that idiot Tower crumbled into dust?" He flicked his golden wings imperiously, impressively.
The tourists from Billings, Montana looked woebegone.
"What we're talking here," said Bernie, "is a real case of malfeasance on the job. Contract went to the lowest bidder, of course; which -- in the case of a high-rise should make you more than a bissel nervous, if you catch my drift -- meant that there was too much sand in the mix, the design was sloppy, they hadn't even invented stressed concrete at that point; and forget the rebar. It was a very lousy job, but since nobody spoke the same language, who knew?"
"And it fell down?" the wife asked.
"Ka-boom."
"A long time ago, right?" her husband said.
"We're talking millennia, kiddo."
"Well, that's it, then," the man said. "We lay out fifty dollars for a key to something that doesn't exist; and we miss getting back to our bus; and now you're telling me that I shouldn't even take a drink, something I desperately need after three hours in the goddam desert? And who, may I ask, are you?"
"Phoenix," Bernie said. "But you can call me Bernie; even my enemies call me Bernie."
"Why aren't you ashes?" the wife asked.
Bernie gave her a look. Arched eyebrows. Querulous mien. "That's not till I make my exit. Very impressive, but not just yet, thank you. I'm only seven hundred and thirty-two. I've got at least another good two hundred and fifty in me."
The man edged closer to the pool.
"Then you go poof?" the wife asked.
"According to the rules, there can only be one Phoenix at a time," Bernie said. Then, lightheartedly, "There can only be one Minneapolis at a time, also, but that's another story." He chuckled, and added, "Get away from the pool, buddy."
The tourist from Billings stopped creeping toward the water of the Fountain of Youth, and looked up at the Phoenix. "So you're the one and only Phoenix...at the moment."
"Indeed," Bernie said. "My predecessor, Achmed, lived to be nearly a thousand years old. Nice chap. Bit stuffy, but what the hell can you expect from a Fundamentalist. Not a lot of laughs in their religion."
"I need a drink," the woman said.
"As I told your husband -- I presume this gentleman is your spouse, yes? -- it is really not a spectacular idea to drink from the pool."
"And why is that?"
"Because this is the Fountain of Youth, m'dear; and if you drink from it, not only will you get younger, but you'll live forever. What we, in the Phoenix game, call 'immortality.'"
The tourists from Billings, Montana looked at each other; and in a flash, or possibly a flash and a half, before Bernie could say anything more, they flung themselves forward; faces immersed in the silvery water of the pool that eternally refilled itself from the Fountain of Youth, they drank and drank, and drank deeply. Occasionally, a water belch would break the surface.
When they rose, the bloom of youth was in their cheeks. Magnolias. Or possibly phlox.
They stood, tall and strong-limbed, with the gleam of far horizons in their eyes. The wife put her shoes on; the husband clapped the straw hat on his head; with a wink and a nod, the husband turned and began to stride off toward the West. His wife smiled up at Bernie, gave him a small salute, and said, "Take care of yourself, Bernie," and she strode off after her husband.
Bernie sat there picking his teeth with a talon, fluffing back down from gold to scarlet, and sighed a deep seven hundred and thirty-two year sigh. "There's one born every minute," he said, to no one in particular.
The Phoenix smiled, and drifted off into a pleasant doze in which he would reflect on the ramifications of the genes of the gullible polluting the pool.
Q is for QIONG-SHI
It was night again, and the vampire was on the prowl. San Francisco's Chinatown was roiling with fog. The dim and ominous shapes of buildings seemed to slip in and out of the real world as vagrant light from lampposts filtered through breaks in the swirling gray mist shroud.
Hopping at a regular pace, arms outstretched before it, the qiong-shi sought a fresh victim. Up Powell, down Grand, back and forth through narrow alleys, the vampire hopped, a pale, cadaverous nightmare in moist, fog-clinging funereal robes. At the corner of Kerouac Alley and Columbus Avenue the prowl car spotted him, bouncing high and landing lightly.
They turned on the gumball machine and slewed to a stop crosswise across the alley mouth. Compensating for the bulk of the prowl car, the vampire came down at an impossible angle, and hit the wall of the building. He fell to his knees, and crouched there, trembling, arms outstretched, eyes glaring at nothing.
The officers leapt from the car, threw down on him, and ordered him to hug the pavement. The qiong-shi got to his feet unsteadily, a great bloodless gash across his sulphur-colored forehead, and bounced toward the cops. The rookie fired a warning shot, and the sergeant commanded the suspect to stop.
But the vampire was already in the air, descending in a great looping arc toward the pair. When he hit, they were there, and the sergeant had his baton at ready.
They beat the shit out of the vampire for a considerable time, knocking him to the pavement every time he hopped up. It went on for the better part of a half hour, all of it being filmed by camcorders in the hands of one hundred and thirteen residents of the neighborhood, and a television cameraman circling overhead in a chopper.
When it came to trial, the Chinese-American Protective League and three tong gangs paid for the best attorneys in the state, and the vampire got only two years up at Pelican Bay for assaulting an officer. Or two.
Apart from his special dietary needs -- without a doubt Q was a moveable feast -- the qiong-shi comported himself well, became the bitch of a serial razor-killer named Mojo Paw, and was paroled into a halfway house after only sixteen months.
Rehabilitation was swift, the vampire responded to group analysis, and later ran for public office.
He lost. Big. His opponent, an ex-TV talk show host, beat heavily on the theme: Be Careful What You Vote For, You Might Get It!
R is for RAVEN
I'm sick to death of it, let me tell you! Just fed up! Photosynthesize. Grandiloquent. Tumultuous. Matriculation. Portcullis. Cytoplasmic. Euphonium. Oleomargarine. Nascent. Extemporaneous. Schottische. Captious. Heterogeneous. Marginalia. Oxymoron. Xylophone. Sephardic. Perambulation.
Sick to death, I tell you.
Disgusting stereotypes, that's all it is!
Nevermore, my ass.
S is for SERAPHIM
Good hit, lousy field. Traded down to the Pony League.
T is for TAHAMTAN
PRESS RELEASE. Dateline: Hollywood. 17 April.
Paramount Pictures today announced the resumption of production on the multi-million-dollar theatrical feature Tahamtan, Warrior of Persia, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Based on the life of the legendary mythical hero who lived 2000 years ago, the film has been plagued by union strikes, unexplained accidents on the set, and the untimely death of the original scenarist, Rostam Shayegani, who passed away while only halfway through the screenplay.
Prior to Paramount's commitment to filming the great myth of pre-Iranian Persia, the last person to write about Tahamtan died of grief. Ferdoci was commissioned by King Darush, the Persian ruler, to write a book of the myths and legends surrounding Tahamtan, in order to preserve old Pharsi. He was promised a gold coin for each verse. Over a period of thirty years Ferdoci wrote between fifty and sixty thousand verses.
Darush, direct lineal ancestor of the current head of production at Paramount Studios, contested the bookkeeping and royalty arrangement originally entered into with Ferdoci, and paid him in silver, rather than gold. Ferdoci, according to informed sources, was so upset, that he flung the money back at the Prince, and went off to die of a broken heart, leaving behind a curse upon all Persia.
Since then, Iran has been invaded by the Moslems, and Pharsi has been debased. Ferdoci's book was the last one written in the true language until Paramount's signing this week of a new scenarist guaranteed, by studio executives, to deliver a shootable script.
Paramount Pictures today proudly announce resumption of the film Tahamtan, Warrior of Persia, starring Schwarzenegger, Sharon Stone, Danny DeVito, Sean Young and Zalman King as Rakhsh; directed by Alan Smithee; screenplay by Salman Rushdie.
U is for UNSEELIE
The Seelie Court, the general Scottish name for the good fairies, can be considered, at best, cranky and best left alone by humans. Far worse are the fairies of the Unseelie Court. Their hatred of humans is monumental. They comprise the sluagh, the band of the unsanctified dead who hover above the earth, snatching up to themselves the undefended mortals they then use to rain down elf-shot against men and cattle.
And you thought it was Martians disemboweling your cows. Boy, how superstitious can you get!
V is for VIGINAE
Minuscule in size, they are demon imps who make their homes at the root of human nose hairs.
No other demons will associate with them.
Chadwick makes a Groomette nose hair cutter recommended in all the best grimoires.
Best to rid oneself of the snotty little bastards.
W is for WYVERN
"Would you prefer the couch, or just hanging there in mid-air?" The psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Bucovitz, MD, Ph.D., FAPA, Mbr AMA-APA & SCPS, Diplomate American Board of Psychiatry & Neurology, Inc., stared up at the three-headed dragon hovering less than a foot beneath the ceiling of his office in Westwood. "If you have no preference, might I suggest the couch...your, uh, breath seems to he singeing the inlaid tropical wood ceiling."
The wyvern's middle head glared down at the doctor.
"Meaning no offense," the doctor said hastily.
The wyvern settled slowly to the floor, ambled to the couch and lay down. Its three heads, on the three ropey strands of muscled neck, remained nearly vertical, though the bulbous body, with its two eagle-like legs and its barbed tail, hung over the sides of the leather chaise. "We have problems," the left head said.
"Of course you do," said Dr. Bucovitz, "and I'm here to help you...or rather, to help you help yourself. That's why Dr. Hildreth referred you to me."
"We heard good things about you," the right head said.
"You did wonders with Ghidrah, we understand," said the middle head.
Bucovitz smiled, then sighed. "Yes, one of my successes. But don't ask about Mothra. I still lament my failure there."
"No one's perfect," said the left head.
"Except Godzilla," said the right.
"Do you always have to add your two cents?" the left head said, with a snap of ice-crusher jaws. "Just because you had her."
"Now stop fighting, you two," said the middle head with a tone of mixed exasperation and mollification.
"Up yours, peacemaker," said the left.
"Bite it, big boy," said the right.
"You see what I have to put up with, Doctor?" said the middle, his eyebrows arching helplessly. "We have problems."
"Uh, excuse me," said Dr. Bucovitz, "did I understand you correctly? Did you say Godzilla was 'she'?"
"Big mouth!" the right head said to the left head. "Now the lizard's really out of the closet!"
"Oh, sure, I'm the gay one here, right?"
"No, you're the homophobe!"
"Flex in here, you shit, I'd like to bite off your eyelids!"
"Yo' mama!"
"Now, now, now!" Bucovitz said, waving his hands. "You really can't go on like this!" His words went unheard, however. The three heads were snapping at each other, twining and untwining, undulating and striking. "Stop it!" the psychiatrist shouted. "Stop it at once, you're the worst patient I've had in here since that little kiss-up E.T." He paused, then added, "Or Streisand."
But there was no hearing him. The three heads of the wyvern lashed at one another, knocking holes in the wall, tearing gobbets of leather from the chaise, clacking and snapping and deafening everyone in the waiting room.
Bucovitz was thrown from his chair by the left head as it performed a loop-the-loop in an attempt at burying its fangs in the carotid of the right head. The psychiatrist crawled to the intercom and slapped open the switch with a bloody hand.
"Ms. Crossen, quickly! I need a second opinion here. Get me Dr. Cerberus immediately!"
Great gouts of flame and thick, oily smoke now filled the office. In the murk Bucovitz could hear the wyvern trying to bite off its own heads. He tried to crawl to the door leading to the safety of the reception room, but the dragon had smashed so much furniture that the exit was blocked. Bucovitz lay in a corner, his head covered by his arms, silently wishing he had gone into electrical engineering.
Suddenly, there was silence.
Bucovitz crawled across the office. He reached the French doors that opened onto the balcony overlooking his townhouse's central garden court. Fumbling through the thick, roiling smoke, he found the latch and lifted it. He threw the doors open and crawled out onto the balcony. Smoke poured out of the room.
As the smoke thinned, he lay on the balcony looking back into the office. Shambles. The definition of the word shambles. "Wait'll you get my bill? he shouted. But from the thinning veil of smoke there was no answer.
"You'd better have damned good Blue Cross!"
Still no answer.
"You do have coverage, don't you?"
Silence.
"Answer me! Dammit, answer me!"
Now the smoke was clearing, and the wyvern could be seen lying in a spavined, sprawled, sanguine heap, each head smiling contentedly. The middle head looked up and winked at Dr. Bucovitz. "Didn't you wonder why Dr. Hildreth, who hates your guts since you stole his wife and practice, and almost got him disbarred, referred us to you?"
"No...you can't mean..."
"Doctor," said all three heads in unison, "we have problems. And so do you."
What is the sound of one psychiatrist weeping?
X is for XOLAS
From the Alacalufs, the indigenous natives of Tierra del Fuego, we learn of the supreme being Xolas, who infuses the newborn child with soul upon its birth, who reabsorbs that soul when death takes the vessel.
Last week Xolas had a garage sale.
Your mother bought two floor lamps with tassel-fringed shades, a lava lamp, and the slightly soiled soul of Joseph Stalin.
Guess what you're getting for your birthday?
Y is for YOG-SOTHOTH
More terrible than even those who "created" him could know. They did not dream him into fiction. He dreamed them into life. There was no being named Howard Phillips Lovecraft, no man named Clark Ashton Smith. Bits of cosmic debris inhaled by the Great Old One, they were blown back out in the shapes that would create the dream of the god on this side of the rift. But its name is not Yog-Sothoth. When the dream-men Lovecraft and Smith absorbed the directions for creation, to build the being that would be worshipped first by readers, then by cultists, then by all...the message was garbled by the veil, warped as it came through the rift. Its name is not Yog-Sothoth. When the anagram is unraveled, and the true name is written, the veil will split, the rift will open, the darkness will come.
At M.I.T., right now, a hacker with too much time on his hands, grown bored with computer bulletin boards, role-playing games, and cheap paperback novels, is running a decoding program.
How many variations can you make from the name Yog-Sothoth? The hacker is only fifteen minutes ahead of you. Closing your windows will not keep the darkness from seeping in.
Z is for ZEUS
Chief deity of the Greek pantheon, called the father by both gods and men, he was an abused child, having been snatched from the jaws of death by his mother, Rhea, when his father, Cronus, decided to eat his children.
Like father, like son.
Don't invite Zeus to dinner.
Talk about disgusting table manners.

FROM A TO Z, IN THE SARSAPARILLA ALPHABET

FROM A TO Z, IN THE SARSAPARILLA ALPHABET

A is for ARCHON
"One more goddam sanctimonious sound, and I swear by the Demiurge, I'll snuff out that mealy-mouthed spark," said #7, sipping cold coffee from a Styrofoam cup.
"Easy...easy..." #12 said, rewinding his penis. "You'd better be grateful this cell is lead-lined. The Old Man hears that kind of bitching, you'll be sweeping out the eyes of hurricanes for the next ten thousand years. Remember, kid, it's just a job. When you've gotten as old in the game as I, well, all the hosanna and selah and blessed-be-His-name rolls off your carapace like Sterno off a bindlestiff."
The Archon oozed off the wall of the detention cell, dissolved into a puddle of sludge in order to rid himself of an annoying itch in his upper eyeball sphincter, and reformed beside the little TV table bearing the last of the doughnuts. He studied the pastries remaining, and muttered, "Glazed. I hate glazed. Serves us right for sending a goy, to buy them. You say raised, they hear glazed. Feh."
The other jailer, the younger, #7, made a retching sound and sent an extrusion of holy greenish flesh across the stone floor of the cell, to tap # 12 on his third leg. "Now who's complaining? This coffee was wretched when Hector was a pup."
But he drained off the last of it, set the Styrofoam cup on the metal bunk, and watched as it cornucopially refilled itself. With cold, bitter coffee.
"So, listen, 12, how did you get into this line of work.?" He was young. perhaps only an eon and a half, and still naive. As if one "got" into this line of work. All but the freshest arrivals knew that in the realm of divine light beyond the universe through the divine emanation (usually referred to on the Celestial Ephemeris as RDLBUTDE, which was a strictly noxious acronym, unpronounceable even to the most linguistically accomplished seraph) pulling guard duty over the divine spark was shit detail reserved for Archons who had somehow royally cheesed off The Old Man.
#12 grimaced. Spending a century or two with this pimply-pricked kid would undoubtedly make him unfit for decent service anywhere in the universe when his tour was up. He thought once again, as he always did when he was a short-timer, of opting for rebirth. But when the time came, and he checked out the condition of the Real World, it was always dirtier and dumber than he'd left it, so he inevitably re-upped. Six hundred and eleven times, to date.
In the corner, glowing fitfully, the divine spark of the human soul reeled off the totality of public utterances once spoken by Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson, and began to make in-roads on the private ruminations of Oral Roberts.
#7 threw the Styrofoam cup at the divine spark. "Will you, in the name of all that's holy, shut the hell up for just five bloody minutes!?!" The divine spark paid no attention, cranky as usual, and more than a trifle meanspirited, and footnoted its Swaggart sayings with minutiae from Anita Bryant, one of the latter day saints.
"Well, kid," #12 said, preening his pinfeathers, "I got into this line of work by creating okra."
"Say what?"
"Okra. You know, okra. It's green."
"I thought she was black. Well, dark-brown, actually."
"Not Oprah, kid! Okra. The vegetable."
"You pulled divine spark jailer duty for creating a vegetable?"
"It wasn't a reward. It was a punishment."
"For a vegetable?"
"Clearly, kid, you have never tasted okra. It was purely not one of my best ideas."
The kid, #7, sighed. "Oh, now I get it," he said. "This is The Old Man's way of kicking me in the ass. I thought I was pulling down cushy duty, something that'd look good on my resume. Boy, talk about not knowing what's happening."
#12 was intrigued. What could this young Archon have done that could equal the nastiness of okra? He asked the kid.
"Beats me," #7 said. "I've only done a couple of things all told. How long, uh, does one figure to be on this detail?"
"Well," #12 said, "I've been watching this stupid spark for eight hundred thousand years, Real World time."
"For a vegetable?"
"I'm up for reassignment in about sixty-five years. I'm short. I can do it standing on my head."
"Holy...The Old Man must've been really honked at me. I saw my dossier. I'm on this duty till Hell freezes over, which I understand doesn't happen for another million and a half years."
"So what'd you do?"
"I created the mail order catalogue. Junk mail."
"You're in it, kid. For a long time. Well and truly."
In the corner, the divine spark droned on, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and on and on and on. After six months, #7 asked the elder Archon, "What are we supposed to do to pass the time?"
"Well, I'll tell you what I did for most of the time I've been here with this imbecile. And I'll be gone soon -- which is, I suppose, why The Old Man brought you in -- so you can practice with me, if you like."
"Yeah, sure. Of course. But...what is it?"
"Gin rummy. Three across, Hollywood style, tenth of a scintilla a point, five hundred per game for schneider."
In the corner, for the first time since the younger Archon had entered the detention cell, the divine spark shut up, perked up, and began making warm, expectant sounds.
"The divine spark plays gin rummy?"
"For eons."
"Well, that's a little better, I guess."
"Not really," said #12.
"Why's that," #7 asked.
"The divine spark of the human soul cheats."
In the corner, the glowing ball chuckled nastily. As Archons went, there was one born every second.
B is for BANSHEE
Just outside Belfast, the heavy metal ripper punk snake-oil rock band that called itself The Fluorescent Stigmatas had been booked into Castle Padveen as the opening night attraction. The ninth Earl of Padveen --Skipper to his friends -- had been offered the options of selling the great stone structure for back taxes or developing some commercial use for the ancestral home, though it was known throughout the land as the most annoyingly haunted edifice in Ireland. Skipper had decided to turn Castle Padveen into a night club. And on opening night, as The Fluorescent Stigmatas launched into their second set, opening with Don't Woof in Mah Haggis, Bitch, the Fender bass player, Nigel, had a massive coronary, pitched over dead, sent the packed audience into paroxysms of anger at having the music stopped, and brought forth the redoubtable banshee of Castle Padveen, acknowledged the noisiest and most off-key wailer of all those ghastly haunts.
The banshee materialized just over the bandstand, her one great nostril blowing air like a bagpipe, her long red hair smoldering and sparking, her empty eyesockets on fire. And she began her dirge, her horrific caterwauling, her teeth-jarring threnody of fingernails down a blackboard...and The Fluorescent Stigmatas nodded, listened, vamped for a minute, then fell in behind her.
Their first album went platinum last week. With a bullet.
C is for CHARON
Among the poster advertisements on the Staten island Ferry is one that shows a terribly thin, extremely unhappy looking man in black cape and cowl, poling a garbage scow bearing the legend Phlegethon, around Manhattan Island. The poster reads: I GOT MY JOB THROUGH THE TIMES
The lonely figure has a copy of The National Enquirer sticking out of his back pocket.
D is for DYBBUK
The dibbuq, in Jewish folklore, is a disembodied human spirit that, because of former sins, wanders restlessly until it finds safe haven in the body of a living person.
It is well-known that the French love the work of Jerry Lewis.
If you look long enough, and hard enough, there is an explanation for even the most arcane aberration.
E is for ECHIDNA
Downunder, in Oz, there is a small, awfully cute monotreme known as the echidna. If you startle this Disneylike animal, it will roll into a spiny ball, belly-up, seemingly comatose.
If one looks up echidna in the Britannica, one learns that the name comes from the Greek for snake: a creature half-woman, half-serpent. Her parents are variously alleged to have been the sea deities Phorcys and Ceto, or Chrysaor -- the hideous son of Medusa -- and Callirrhoe-- the daughter of Oceanus. Further, one learns that among Echidna's children by the hundred-headed Typhoeus were the dragons of the Hesperides, the Hydra, the Chimaera, and the infernal hounds Orthus and Cerebus. Which makes Orthus's progeny, the Nemean Lion and the Sphinx, the Echidna's grandchildren.
The echidna lives faraway at the bottom of the world, mostly rolled up in a ball. Is it bothered? Certainly not.
But not one of those ungrateful kids calls, sends a card, even during the High Holy Days. But, hey, listen, like a Brillo pad, that's what's got to be a mother's heart. I'll just lie here belly-up in the dark.
F is for FENRIS
The deep core rig went down five miles into the Ross Shelf. When the fiber optic snorkel cameras ringing the drill burned out, they withdrew. At the base of the core sample, in the block of ice eight feet across and fifteen feet deep, they found what had blinded the instruments.
Frozen in ice was a gigantic wolf.
When they swung the section overhead on the gigantic pneumatic crane, they understood what had scorched the optics: the beast, trailing a broken chain, was giving off heat and light. Its body glowed from within, and the ice melted, showering on the drilling crew and geologists. The block slipped its moorings, crashed to the ground, and shattered. The wolf shook itself massively, its evil green eyes surveying the terrified crew. Then it threw back its head, howled at the bright sky, and loped away to the north.
But if this is Ragnarok, and Fenris has swallowed the sun...
Whose eye continues to burn down upon us?
G is for GOD
GOD is an acronym for Good Old Demon. This good old demon's name is Bernie. Bernie is your basic good old boy demon. Bernie owns Texas. They say there is no god in Texas. Boy, are they wrong.
H is for HIPPOGRIFF
The metaphor. From Virgil. "To cross griffins with horses." Meaning: to attempt the impossible.
The metaphor. A small, unruly beast with paper breath and bones of conjecture. The metaphor, like the hippogriff, of mixed parentage. The date-rape of logic by surmise. When the metaphor takes wing, it is with a rush of sound such as one hears only when phantom locomotives play sackbut, lyre and symbol.
The hippogriff slides through the tawny waters, warfling and wobbling. Hear the song of the hippogriff: etymology' in the key of skeleton.
I is for ILITHYIA
It was in all the papers. In Minnesota, the midwife Ilithyia was brought up on charges for performing unlicensed abortions. The trial was a sensation. The jury was composed entirely of men. When they brought in the verdict guilty, and the members of the Right to Life League stood up to cheer, Ilithyia said, "Ah, screw it," and smote them hip and thigh with bolts of chartreuse lightning.
This year, Minnesota goes Pro-Choice.
J is for JACKALOPE
Texas, again. Land of myth and wonder. Home of a million private lives. The choking Doberman. The kitten in the microwave. The jackalope.
Yankees think the jackalope was the invention of a guy who wanted to sell big brag postcards -- here's one of our oranges, it says, and it's a painting of a watermelon-sized Navel -- the crossing of a jack rabbit with an antelope. Huge hind legs that permit the beast to go like a sonofabitch on fire! Huge ears flattened by the wind as it races eighty miles an hour across the Panhandle.
That's a lot the damned Yankees know.
Down here in Nacogdoches we know better. Just ask Joe Lansdale. Joe was stalked and damned near killed by a rabid jackalope maybe two, three years ago. Only saved himself at the last moment by using the one weapon that can kill a jackalope.
He stabbed it through the heart with a Stuckey pecan praline.
K is for KELPIE
It was late, well past the hour in which they closed the pool. But Hester had gotten special dispensation from the building's management. Not only because she was an administrative assistant at Chicago Sky Tower, and thus entitled to a few minor privileges, but because she had spent the past three days, almost without break, reorganizing the database: the condo owners on floors fifty through ninety, five, their dependants and hired help, anyone cleared for access to the dwelling storeys; the offices from twelve to fifty, all staff members down to the last wage-slave in the typing pool; the galleria shops and their sales force from ground level to twelve...the data fields went on and on.
It was little enough for them to key her in for a late night swim in the warm, silent Olympic-sized swimming pool.
Hester floated on her back, auburn hair trailing on the surface like a Portuguese man-of-war. She had turned on only the valance lights; their soft blue-white glow cast a calming, almost ethereal luminescence across the gently rippling water.
There was the sound of a door closing on metal jamb.
Hester swam quickly to the edge of the pool, and pressed herself against it. She was naked.
The man was tall, and dark. She could not tell whether he was Caucasian or Negro. His skin was almost the shade of teak, a golden hue that gave no indication of heritage. But it wasn't suntan, genuine or salon-produced.
He strode toward her, and looked down.
"I hope I'm not disturbing you," he said. His voice was buttered toast. If she had ever trusted anyone in her life, she trusted him. His smile, his manner, the way his hands lay along the seams of his pants. Kind eyes and honest speaking.
"Well, the pool is actually closed," she said, not wanting to offend him, afraid of losing him even before he had had a chance to discover her. "I'm staff here at the Tower. They let me use it after hours sometimes."
"May I swim with you for a while?"
She dimpled prettily. There had been a husband, briefly, eleven years earlier. A passion or two since. Nothing more. "To be honest," she said, "I'm naked. I wasn't expecting anyone else. The doors were supposed to be locked and -- "
How had he gained entrance? She wanted to ask him, but he was removing his clothes. "That should be all right," he said. "No problem. And nothing to feel awkward about."
He stood naked at the edge of the pool, almost aglow with his easy beauty. Then he seemed to lift from the tile edge, as if airborne; arched over her; and sliced into the pool as smoothly and cleanly as a paper cut.
She watched him stroke away from her, barely making a splash. He reached the deep end, tucked and rolled, and beat his way down to the shallow end. Then he came back. She watched, realizing she had been holding her breath.
And when he came to her, she laid her hand on his bleep and felt the blood heating beneath the skin. He reached for her, and took her hand and put it on his hip, and her hand slid between his legs, and she knew that there would be more than swimming.
He pressed against her, and her back went flat to the tiled side of the pool. She let her arms trail at her sides, and when he spread her legs and lifted them around his hips, her arms laid out in the overflow gutter, giving her the proper height. She felt him trying to penetrate, and she closed her eyes, her head thrown back; and then he was inside her.
And in that instant the kelpie changed shape. His sleek head of hair --which she now realized had been wet even before he had entered the water--seemed matted with weeds. She felt a terrible pain as he expanded within her, and the sound he made was that of an animal, a cross between a horse and a bull.
The kelpie went to its native form, holding her helpless. To be mounted, to be drowned, and her flesh to be eaten. The kelpie, servant of the Devil. Hester screamed...
And fought back. First she trapped his organ within her, held in a grip as tight as a walnut shell. Then she changed. Her body expanded, altered, flowed, and reformed.
Flesh was eaten. But not hers.
Love is a changeling. The kelpie: waterhorse. Hester: the sharkling. There are forms that are ancient, and there are natural predators. More recent.
The water was warm. And peculiarly tainted.
L is for LEVIATHAN
In what would have been the year 6250 B.C. the crippled century-vessel from somewhere in the deeps of space fell through our galaxy, and entered the atmosphere at such a steep angle that only one pod of the great ship survived, crashing into the sea and vanishing.
On April 14, 1912, the Titanic struck a berg off the Grand Banks and went to the bottom, carrying 1517 souls to their death.
The race that had come to an unwanted new home in the deeps watched the poor ship die, and felt pity. In their compassion they went to the creature and mated with it; and they lived in harmony for almost seventy-five years, and the progeny of that union swam through the oceans of the Earth undiscovered and unimpeded.
Then the ghouls violated the tomb. They came to the shell of the mother and they stole. They ravaged the corpse.
And the children rose, and went in search of the entrepreneurs who had gone through the pockets of the shroud for pennies. And in New York harbor, in the stretch of water known as the Narrows, the first born of that metallic union rose with its gleaming sinewy length, and began exacting vengeance of the parasites that had so dishonored the memory of its mother.
Now the seacoast of the world is forbidden territory.
You can see their eyes glowing offshore every night.
M is for MUT
Osiris met her at the fresh fruit counter of the A & P in the Blue Nile Mall. She was squeezing pomegranates. He dallied, pretending to blight the figs, and finally was able to catch her eye. "Horus," she said, when he returned the eye. "Lovely," he replied, meaning the Eye of Horus and meaning her, as well, but basically too shy to say it without covering his verbal tracks. "And all-seeing, as well," she added, dimpling prettily. He smiled; she smiled; and he asked her name. "Isis Luanne Jane Marie," she said, "but my friends all call me Isis." He went pink and stammered, and finally managed to say, "May I call you Isis?" and she said yes, that would be lovely, and did he come here often? And he said, oh only to practice a little resurrection in the meat department, and she gifted him with a giggle and a pirouette, and he asked her where she was from, and she said, "Lower Egypt, over that way," and she motioned toward the parking lot. But Osiris's heart turned to ash, as he noticed for the first time the cobra totem of Buto on Isis's perky baseball cap, worn slantwise in the homeboy style so popular at the moment. He was glad he hadn't worn his falcon's crest Borsalino, the dead giveaway that he was from Upper Egypt. It would have shamed her immediately -- coming from the wrong side of the tracks as she did--actually the lower side of the tracks -- and he didn't know what he was going to do. Because as surely as Aunt Taueret had made whoopee with a hippopotamus, he knew he had fallen in love with this Isis from Lower Egypt, and he knew that his mother was never going to approve of the relationship. He could hear her now: You can't be serious, Osiris dear; why, she simply isn't Our Sort.
But they began dating on the sly, catching a double-bill during the Hays Harareet Film Festival at the Luxor multiplex, flogging fellahs and feeding the pieces to Nubian lions, sneaking out for a smoke behind the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut; and in general carrying on the way young people in love have carried on since Ra was only a twinkle in the cosmic egg.
And finally, it became clear to Osiris that he had to come clean; that he could not stumble through eternity without Isis Luanne Jane Marie at his side. So he sat her down one evening in front of the baboon paintings at Tuna Gebel, where they had gone to eat because they'd heard that Gebel made the best tuna in pits anywhere in the Twin Kingdoms, and he told her he was from this wealthy family in Upper Egypt, and his mother was Mut, and if they were ever to be as one they would have to go and see his mother to get her blessing.
At first Isis was beside herself. She wept and tried to run off, but Osiris held her and soothed her and told her he loved her more than sliced papyrus, and finally she was able to sob a question. "What about your father? Wouldn't he intercede for us?" And Osiris thought about his dad, who spent most of his time worrying about wheat and barley, and figuring out ways to con Osiris into coming into the family business, and he replied, "Much as I love Amon, I think Pop ain't going to be much help. Mom's got him pretty well whipped. I don't think he's ever gotten past the vulture head. You know, they were sort of betrothed at birth kind of thing."
But they knew what had to be done, and so they went to see Mut.
It had been a particularly shitty day for Mut, that day they came, what with the sun halting in the heavens again, and the plague of murrain, and so when Osiris appeared in the throne room with Isis, Mut gave a little shriek with two of her three heads, shaking her plumes of truth. "Where the hell did she come from?!" she demanded. She was clearly distraught.
"You know my beloved?" Osiris cried.
"Know her...?" Mut screamed, "Of course I know her, you ignorant twit! She's your goddam sister!"
"Oops," said Osiris.
"Don't tell me you did it!" Mut howled. One look at the young lovers was enough. "Oh, name of the Trinitarian," Mut lamented, "no wonder I can't get the sun to work properly. You useless brat. I told your father sending one of the twins away wouldn't be enough, but oh no, not him, Mr. Soft Hearted!"
And she proceeded to strike Osiris dead. And Isis fell to her knees and tried to bring him back to life. And she tried real hard, she really did; but nothing. Naught. Zip. Yet her power was formidable, and she gave birth to their child right there in the throne room.
And Horus was looked upon by his grandmother Mut, and he was found comely in her eyes, and eventually she got it on with him, and when they cast the movie Mut was slapped around by Jack Nicholson till she admitted, "He's my husband...he's my grandson...he's my husband...he's my grandson...he's my husband and my grandson," and John Huston got off clean, no indictment at all, and the sequel lost a fortune.
N is for NIDHOOG
Amos Gaskill met the only tree on Skillet Six Mile Flats neck-first. It was a stunted, ugly thing, the only tree out there on Skillet Six Mile Flats: it came thrusting up out of the hardpan at a fifty-degree angle, its roots aboveground like a junkheap of a thousand wicker chairs broken and cast abandoned, black and tangled, clots of hair dirt embedded in the coils; the roots twisted and joined the bloated ugly thick and oily trunk in gnarled sutures that could be imagined as charred open mouths sucking at pregnant bark; without leaf or bud, crippled limbs bent and flung in corrupt shapes against the gray sky; like a famously scorched corpse, all black and sooty, tormented in design, blighted in every particular; a single desperate shape gasping for life in blasted flatland.
They had to cut the rope by a third, and retie the knot, before they looped it over the topmost branch: at its original length, circling the black neck of Amos Gaskill, as black as the bole of the unlovely tree, he would have been standing on the chapped, cracked earth, the rope hanging limply past his shoulder. And even when they had cut it by a third, and retied the hangman's knot, and pulled him up tight, the best they could get was the toes of his work-boots barely scraping the hardpan, making irregular slashes in the ground as he choked and struggled and swung himself to and fro trying to get his legs to stretch that quarter of an inch so he might stand, and stop choking, and not die. But all he got was a shallow furrow below each boot, and the spittle and gagging and swollen tongue.
They passed the bottle of McCormick bourbon from man to man, till all four had depleted the aquifer by half. They scratched and squatted and shifted from foot to foot, all the while fascinated by the dying. Amos Gaskill was their first activity, and for a black guy who'd had the misfortune to stop at an ATM while they were sitting in the bank's parking lot around five in the morning, drinking and bragging about how they were going to make America a White Man's Nation once again, he was doing the dying pretty impressively.
Amos Gaskill seemed determined not to choke to death. He kept swinging, kept gagging, twisted even though his eyes had rolled back to show elephant ivory, twisted around and then spun back again; but wouldn't die. In fact, they had tied the knot so ineptly, had placed it so incorrectly, that even had they dropped him from a height, with his toes not scraping the gray claypan every time he moved, his neck would not have snapped, his breath would not have been cut off. They were simply too new at this business, and weren't very good workmen to begin with. In fact, had they wanted to do it properly, they might have hired Amos Gaskill to assist them: he was a master carpenter, cabinetmaker, brick-layer, and all-around excellent, meticulous handyman. He would have rigged the garrote imperially.
They muttered among themselves, why the hell don't he die, but Amos Gaskill all white-orbed and tendon-stretched, continued to thrash and tremble and almost snarl around his swollen tongue. And then they heard the faint ratchet sounds of rats nibbling beneath them. Not rats, no, perhaps not rats, too strong and getting louder robe rats; probably a prairie dog or a family of prairie dogs, maybe a mole, or a snake moving in its tunnel. And the sounds grew louder, with a peculiar echoing quality, like a twopenny nail being scraped along the stainless steel wall of a wind-tunnel or caisson sunk deep in the earth; like a vibration from the core coming to the surface. And the ground trembled, and the claypan fractured in tiny running-lines like the smile wrinkles on an octogenarian's face, and the rifts grew wider, deeper, and the dirt thrust up -- a mound of it right under Amos Gaskill's feet, and he was able to stand, gasping, his eyes reappearing -- and the limbs of the tree writhed as the kraken woke and slithered up the well, Hvergelmir, and broke the surface first with its many-nostriled snout, sniffing the dry heat of the Skillet Six Mile Flats, and then one eye on a twisting, moist stalk, looking around wildly for what had done the quickening, what had done the awakening, and then a portion of the head, immense and lumpy and gray as the dust itself, and then the rest of it, Nidhogg, Nidhoog, Nidhug, the gnawing life at the root of life; and it came forth in full, cracking their faces like cheap plastic, letting the blood run down its jerking shape to water the roots, and it dipped the limb till the rope slipped off, and it stared balefully at Amos Gaskill, and considered diet for a heartbeat, and then withdrew, leaving spasmed earth in its wake.
And Amos Gaskill gathered the pieces of the leaders of the White Man's Nation, and those that were not dry and could not be stacked by hand he spaded up with a shovel from the back of the little red pickup truck in which they'd brought him from the bank's parking lot very early that morning, and some of the pieces were simply too small or soggy, so he left them to rot in the heat, and he drove away from the lone tree in the middle of Skillet Six Mile Flats.
To be canny rulers of the White Man's Nation, one must know the answer to the question why the hell don't he die, which is: never lynch a man on Yggdrasil, the ash tree that is the foundation of the universe, the life tree at whose roots forever dwells and noshes the insatiable Nidhug.
Only fools try to kill someone on the tree of life.
O is for ONI
From the New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology: "Oni: invisible devil-demons, whose presence may be detected because they sing, whistle or talk..."
O, I got plenty of Oni, and Oni's plenty for me. I got my Yin, I got my Yang, I got my supernaturally. Thass me... O-neeeee... Yass, I got plenny of Oni, An' Oni's the gaki fer me! (Refrain, second verse, up-tempo.)
P is for PHOENIX
The sightseeing bus to Paradise had left nearly an hour earlier, when the tourists from Billings, Montana came wandering back to the Fountain of Youth. Bernie sat on the lowermost branch of the Tree of Life, overlooking the Fountain, using an emery board on his talons and regularly preening his feathers. He watched their approach from the East, and thought to himself, Here we go again.
The husband and wife came trudging to the edge of the pool that surrounded the Fountain of Youth, and the woman sat down in the sand, and emptied her spectator pumps. Her husband, a corpulent man in his fifties, removed his straw hat, pulled a soiled handkerchief from his hip pocket, and swabbed at his sweating brow. He bent to take a drink from the Fountain.
"Probably not a terrific idea," Bernie said, spreading his wings and fluffing through the range of scarlet into gold.
The tourist looked up. "Beg your pardon?"
"What I said," said the Phoenix, "is that it's not in your best interests to take a drink from this pool."
"We've been walking across the desert for about three hours," the man said. "I assume the tour bus left without us." The Phoenix nodded, aimed a wingtip toward the West.
"Well, a fine howdoyoudo that is," the wife of the tourist said, herself a tourist. "Just take off and abandon us without so much as a by-your-leave."
"They waited almost an hour," Bernie said. "The bus driver said something about having to get back for the Apocalypse, or somesuch. To be fair, though, they really couldn't provide any sort of 'by.your-leave,' because you weren't here."
"Three hours," the man said. "Three hours in the desert, walkingback, just because one of the other people on the tour, I think an orthodontist from Beirut, said we could see the remains of the last four or five levels of the Tower of Babel if we walked over thataways."
"And you believed him?" Bernie asked, trying to restrain his amusement.
"Well..."
"And how much did he stick you for the map?" the Phoenix said.
"Map? What map?"
"Then what was it?"
"Er, uh, you mean the key?"
"Oh, that's sensational," Bernie said, unable to restrain himself any longer. "A key? He sold you a key? To what?"
"To the secret door in the base of the Tower of Ba--" He stopped. "You're trying to tell me we were hoodwinked?"
"Fleeced is more like it," the Phoenix said. "You know how many millennia it's been since that idiot Tower crumbled into dust?" He flicked his golden wings imperiously, impressively.
The tourists from Billings, Montana looked woebegone.
"What we're talking here," said Bernie, "is a real case of malfeasance on the job. Contract went to the lowest bidder, of course; which -- in the case of a high-rise should make you more than a bissel nervous, if you catch my drift -- meant that there was too much sand in the mix, the design was sloppy, they hadn't even invented stressed concrete at that point; and forget the rebar. It was a very lousy job, but since nobody spoke the same language, who knew?"
"And it fell down?" the wife asked.
"Ka-boom."
"A long time ago, right?" her husband said.
"We're talking millennia, kiddo."
"Well, that's it, then," the man said. "We lay out fifty dollars for a key to something that doesn't exist; and we miss getting back to our bus; and now you're telling me that I shouldn't even take a drink, something I desperately need after three hours in the goddam desert? And who, may I ask, are you?"
"Phoenix," Bernie said. "But you can call me Bernie; even my enemies call me Bernie."
"Why aren't you ashes?" the wife asked.
Bernie gave her a look. Arched eyebrows. Querulous mien. "That's not till I make my exit. Very impressive, but not just yet, thank you. I'm only seven hundred and thirty-two. I've got at least another good two hundred and fifty in me."
The man edged closer to the pool.
"Then you go poof?" the wife asked.
"According to the rules, there can only be one Phoenix at a time," Bernie said. Then, lightheartedly, "There can only be one Minneapolis at a time, also, but that's another story." He chuckled, and added, "Get away from the pool, buddy."
The tourist from Billings stopped creeping toward the water of the Fountain of Youth, and looked up at the Phoenix. "So you're the one and only Phoenix...at the moment."
"Indeed," Bernie said. "My predecessor, Achmed, lived to be nearly a thousand years old. Nice chap. Bit stuffy, but what the hell can you expect from a Fundamentalist. Not a lot of laughs in their religion."
"I need a drink," the woman said.
"As I told your husband -- I presume this gentleman is your spouse, yes? -- it is really not a spectacular idea to drink from the pool."
"And why is that?"
"Because this is the Fountain of Youth, m'dear; and if you drink from it, not only will you get younger, but you'll live forever. What we, in the Phoenix game, call 'immortality.'"
The tourists from Billings, Montana looked at each other; and in a flash, or possibly a flash and a half, before Bernie could say anything more, they flung themselves forward; faces immersed in the silvery water of the pool that eternally refilled itself from the Fountain of Youth, they drank and drank, and drank deeply. Occasionally, a water belch would break the surface.
When they rose, the bloom of youth was in their cheeks. Magnolias. Or possibly phlox.
They stood, tall and strong-limbed, with the gleam of far horizons in their eyes. The wife put her shoes on; the husband clapped the straw hat on his head; with a wink and a nod, the husband turned and began to stride off toward the West. His wife smiled up at Bernie, gave him a small salute, and said, "Take care of yourself, Bernie," and she strode off after her husband.
Bernie sat there picking his teeth with a talon, fluffing back down from gold to scarlet, and sighed a deep seven hundred and thirty-two year sigh. "There's one born every minute," he said, to no one in particular.
The Phoenix smiled, and drifted off into a pleasant doze in which he would reflect on the ramifications of the genes of the gullible polluting the pool.
Q is for QIONG-SHI
It was night again, and the vampire was on the prowl. San Francisco's Chinatown was roiling with fog. The dim and ominous shapes of buildings seemed to slip in and out of the real world as vagrant light from lampposts filtered through breaks in the swirling gray mist shroud.
Hopping at a regular pace, arms outstretched before it, the qiong-shi sought a fresh victim. Up Powell, down Grand, back and forth through narrow alleys, the vampire hopped, a pale, cadaverous nightmare in moist, fog-clinging funereal robes. At the corner of Kerouac Alley and Columbus Avenue the prowl car spotted him, bouncing high and landing lightly.
They turned on the gumball machine and slewed to a stop crosswise across the alley mouth. Compensating for the bulk of the prowl car, the vampire came down at an impossible angle, and hit the wall of the building. He fell to his knees, and crouched there, trembling, arms outstretched, eyes glaring at nothing.
The officers leapt from the car, threw down on him, and ordered him to hug the pavement. The qiong-shi got to his feet unsteadily, a great bloodless gash across his sulphur-colored forehead, and bounced toward the cops. The rookie fired a warning shot, and the sergeant commanded the suspect to stop.
But the vampire was already in the air, descending in a great looping arc toward the pair. When he hit, they were there, and the sergeant had his baton at ready.
They beat the shit out of the vampire for a considerable time, knocking him to the pavement every time he hopped up. It went on for the better part of a half hour, all of it being filmed by camcorders in the hands of one hundred and thirteen residents of the neighborhood, and a television cameraman circling overhead in a chopper.
When it came to trial, the Chinese-American Protective League and three tong gangs paid for the best attorneys in the state, and the vampire got only two years up at Pelican Bay for assaulting an officer. Or two.
Apart from his special dietary needs -- without a doubt Q was a moveable feast -- the qiong-shi comported himself well, became the bitch of a serial razor-killer named Mojo Paw, and was paroled into a halfway house after only sixteen months.
Rehabilitation was swift, the vampire responded to group analysis, and later ran for public office.
He lost. Big. His opponent, an ex-TV talk show host, beat heavily on the theme: Be Careful What You Vote For, You Might Get It!
R is for RAVEN
I'm sick to death of it, let me tell you! Just fed up! Photosynthesize. Grandiloquent. Tumultuous. Matriculation. Portcullis. Cytoplasmic. Euphonium. Oleomargarine. Nascent. Extemporaneous. Schottische. Captious. Heterogeneous. Marginalia. Oxymoron. Xylophone. Sephardic. Perambulation.
Sick to death, I tell you.
Disgusting stereotypes, that's all it is!
Nevermore, my ass.
S is for SERAPHIM
Good hit, lousy field. Traded down to the Pony League.
T is for TAHAMTAN
PRESS RELEASE. Dateline: Hollywood. 17 April.
Paramount Pictures today announced the resumption of production on the multi-million-dollar theatrical feature Tahamtan, Warrior of Persia, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Based on the life of the legendary mythical hero who lived 2000 years ago, the film has been plagued by union strikes, unexplained accidents on the set, and the untimely death of the original scenarist, Rostam Shayegani, who passed away while only halfway through the screenplay.
Prior to Paramount's commitment to filming the great myth of pre-Iranian Persia, the last person to write about Tahamtan died of grief. Ferdoci was commissioned by King Darush, the Persian ruler, to write a book of the myths and legends surrounding Tahamtan, in order to preserve old Pharsi. He was promised a gold coin for each verse. Over a period of thirty years Ferdoci wrote between fifty and sixty thousand verses.
Darush, direct lineal ancestor of the current head of production at Paramount Studios, contested the bookkeeping and royalty arrangement originally entered into with Ferdoci, and paid him in silver, rather than gold. Ferdoci, according to informed sources, was so upset, that he flung the money back at the Prince, and went off to die of a broken heart, leaving behind a curse upon all Persia.
Since then, Iran has been invaded by the Moslems, and Pharsi has been debased. Ferdoci's book was the last one written in the true language until Paramount's signing this week of a new scenarist guaranteed, by studio executives, to deliver a shootable script.
Paramount Pictures today proudly announce resumption of the film Tahamtan, Warrior of Persia, starring Schwarzenegger, Sharon Stone, Danny DeVito, Sean Young and Zalman King as Rakhsh; directed by Alan Smithee; screenplay by Salman Rushdie.
U is for UNSEELIE
The Seelie Court, the general Scottish name for the good fairies, can be considered, at best, cranky and best left alone by humans. Far worse are the fairies of the Unseelie Court. Their hatred of humans is monumental. They comprise the sluagh, the band of the unsanctified dead who hover above the earth, snatching up to themselves the undefended mortals they then use to rain down elf-shot against men and cattle.
And you thought it was Martians disemboweling your cows. Boy, how superstitious can you get!
V is for VIGINAE
Minuscule in size, they are demon imps who make their homes at the root of human nose hairs.
No other demons will associate with them.
Chadwick makes a Groomette nose hair cutter recommended in all the best grimoires.
Best to rid oneself of the snotty little bastards.
W is for WYVERN
"Would you prefer the couch, or just hanging there in mid-air?" The psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Bucovitz, MD, Ph.D., FAPA, Mbr AMA-APA & SCPS, Diplomate American Board of Psychiatry & Neurology, Inc., stared up at the three-headed dragon hovering less than a foot beneath the ceiling of his office in Westwood. "If you have no preference, might I suggest the couch...your, uh, breath seems to he singeing the inlaid tropical wood ceiling."
The wyvern's middle head glared down at the doctor.
"Meaning no offense," the doctor said hastily.
The wyvern settled slowly to the floor, ambled to the couch and lay down. Its three heads, on the three ropey strands of muscled neck, remained nearly vertical, though the bulbous body, with its two eagle-like legs and its barbed tail, hung over the sides of the leather chaise. "We have problems," the left head said.
"Of course you do," said Dr. Bucovitz, "and I'm here to help you...or rather, to help you help yourself. That's why Dr. Hildreth referred you to me."
"We heard good things about you," the right head said.
"You did wonders with Ghidrah, we understand," said the middle head.
Bucovitz smiled, then sighed. "Yes, one of my successes. But don't ask about Mothra. I still lament my failure there."
"No one's perfect," said the left head.
"Except Godzilla," said the right.
"Do you always have to add your two cents?" the left head said, with a snap of ice-crusher jaws. "Just because you had her."
"Now stop fighting, you two," said the middle head with a tone of mixed exasperation and mollification.
"Up yours, peacemaker," said the left.
"Bite it, big boy," said the right.
"You see what I have to put up with, Doctor?" said the middle, his eyebrows arching helplessly. "We have problems."
"Uh, excuse me," said Dr. Bucovitz, "did I understand you correctly? Did you say Godzilla was 'she'?"
"Big mouth!" the right head said to the left head. "Now the lizard's really out of the closet!"
"Oh, sure, I'm the gay one here, right?"
"No, you're the homophobe!"
"Flex in here, you shit, I'd like to bite off your eyelids!"
"Yo' mama!"
"Now, now, now!" Bucovitz said, waving his hands. "You really can't go on like this!" His words went unheard, however. The three heads were snapping at each other, twining and untwining, undulating and striking. "Stop it!" the psychiatrist shouted. "Stop it at once, you're the worst patient I've had in here since that little kiss-up E.T." He paused, then added, "Or Streisand."
But there was no hearing him. The three heads of the wyvern lashed at one another, knocking holes in the wall, tearing gobbets of leather from the chaise, clacking and snapping and deafening everyone in the waiting room.
Bucovitz was thrown from his chair by the left head as it performed a loop-the-loop in an attempt at burying its fangs in the carotid of the right head. The psychiatrist crawled to the intercom and slapped open the switch with a bloody hand.
"Ms. Crossen, quickly! I need a second opinion here. Get me Dr. Cerberus immediately!"
Great gouts of flame and thick, oily smoke now filled the office. In the murk Bucovitz could hear the wyvern trying to bite off its own heads. He tried to crawl to the door leading to the safety of the reception room, but the dragon had smashed so much furniture that the exit was blocked. Bucovitz lay in a corner, his head covered by his arms, silently wishing he had gone into electrical engineering.
Suddenly, there was silence.
Bucovitz crawled across the office. He reached the French doors that opened onto the balcony overlooking his townhouse's central garden court. Fumbling through the thick, roiling smoke, he found the latch and lifted it. He threw the doors open and crawled out onto the balcony. Smoke poured out of the room.
As the smoke thinned, he lay on the balcony looking back into the office. Shambles. The definition of the word shambles. "Wait'll you get my bill? he shouted. But from the thinning veil of smoke there was no answer.
"You'd better have damned good Blue Cross!"
Still no answer.
"You do have coverage, don't you?"
Silence.
"Answer me! Dammit, answer me!"
Now the smoke was clearing, and the wyvern could be seen lying in a spavined, sprawled, sanguine heap, each head smiling contentedly. The middle head looked up and winked at Dr. Bucovitz. "Didn't you wonder why Dr. Hildreth, who hates your guts since you stole his wife and practice, and almost got him disbarred, referred us to you?"
"No...you can't mean..."
"Doctor," said all three heads in unison, "we have problems. And so do you."
What is the sound of one psychiatrist weeping?
X is for XOLAS
From the Alacalufs, the indigenous natives of Tierra del Fuego, we learn of the supreme being Xolas, who infuses the newborn child with soul upon its birth, who reabsorbs that soul when death takes the vessel.
Last week Xolas had a garage sale.
Your mother bought two floor lamps with tassel-fringed shades, a lava lamp, and the slightly soiled soul of Joseph Stalin.
Guess what you're getting for your birthday?
Y is for YOG-SOTHOTH
More terrible than even those who "created" him could know. They did not dream him into fiction. He dreamed them into life. There was no being named Howard Phillips Lovecraft, no man named Clark Ashton Smith. Bits of cosmic debris inhaled by the Great Old One, they were blown back out in the shapes that would create the dream of the god on this side of the rift. But its name is not Yog-Sothoth. When the dream-men Lovecraft and Smith absorbed the directions for creation, to build the being that would be worshipped first by readers, then by cultists, then by all...the message was garbled by the veil, warped as it came through the rift. Its name is not Yog-Sothoth. When the anagram is unraveled, and the true name is written, the veil will split, the rift will open, the darkness will come.
At M.I.T., right now, a hacker with too much time on his hands, grown bored with computer bulletin boards, role-playing games, and cheap paperback novels, is running a decoding program.
How many variations can you make from the name Yog-Sothoth? The hacker is only fifteen minutes ahead of you. Closing your windows will not keep the darkness from seeping in.
Z is for ZEUS
Chief deity of the Greek pantheon, called the father by both gods and men, he was an abused child, having been snatched from the jaws of death by his mother, Rhea, when his father, Cronus, decided to eat his children.
Like father, like son.
Don't invite Zeus to dinner.
Talk about disgusting table manners.